NOTE:  Rescheduled for Sunday, February 21st from 7:30 to 8:45 PM Eastern Time

To register, click here

What is Music Appreciation for an Ageless Mind?

It’s an ongoing series of educational sessions about music that you can enjoy from the comfort of your home simply by calling in on your own phone. We will send you the bridgeline and PIN number after you register.  Each session can stand alone and will be available to you afterwards as an mp3 recording if you register, whether or not you can attend in person.

On February 21st we will explore the agelessness of the creative musical mind.

Josh will share his broad and deep knowledge of music with you in an interactive format. Lynne will contribute insights about music from research in neuroscience and positive psychology.

Here’s some food for thought:

Do you know how old Paul McCartney was when he wrote “When I’m 64” and what makes the song a classic?

Do you know the connection between Igor Stravinsky and that old standard “Happy Birthday”?

Do you know what kinds of music tend to relax or stimulate us and why?

Join us to learn the answers to these questions and more.

You will get many benefits from attending Music Appreciation for an Ageless Mind.

• You will get specific information about some of the very best performances of the music we play for you, so you can add them to your own collection.
• While you enjoy listening to the music we feature–some familiar and some new–you will also be stimulating new brain growth.  Learning about music at the same time as you listen to it activates many different parts of the brain, for a “balanced workout.”  (See, for example, Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain (Oxford U Press, 2009)
• You can give your body a virtual workout while you listen and learn with us.  To make music all you need is your own heartbeat.  Music appreciation can also be fun!
• You will learn how you can consciously utilize music to strengthen your spirit, mind and body.  Music’s transcendent qualities and its ability to stir profound feelings can help increase overall well-being, especially when you understand how to listen. If you are interested, we can even help you develop a Mindful Musical Practice using specific kinds of music.

So we invite you to join us for Music Appreciation for an Ageless Mind as we begin our voyage into the infinite world of great music in exciting performances.

When:  Sunday evening February 21st from 7:30 to 8:45 PM ET

Where:  on your own telephone (*see note below).  We will send you the bridgeline and PIN number after you register.

Cost: $20.00 per session.  (You will be entitled to the recording whether or not you attend in person.)

To register:  click here.  Or if you prefer, contact us here and let us know you will be sending a check made out to Joshua Berrett, PhD, 55 East Way, Mt Kisco NY 10549-3504.

Subscribe to our newsletter to become part of our mailing list for future phone seminars and in-person programs.

Questions?  Contact us.

*note:  if you have never attended a teleseminar, you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy and enjoyable it is to participate. We have presented versions of our program to enthusiastic participants through the phone, in libraries, and at the 3rd National Conference on Positive Aging in 2009.

Music as Brain Food Teleseminar

To register for the teleseminar “Music as Brain Food,”  February 14th, 2010 from 9:00 to 10:15 P.M. Eastern Time (8:00 to 9:15 Central Time; 7:00 to 8:15 Mountain Time; 6:00 to 7:15 Pacific Time), please click  here

Give a special Valentine’s Day Gift to yourself or someone you love this year!

You know the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  More and more research supports this ancient wisdom.

That’s why we have created MUSIC AS BRAIN FOOD, a program dedicated to promoting the health of your brain (and with it, your mind, body and spirit) through music.

HOW DOES THE PROGRAM WORK?

• Each session is on a separate topic. We have planned a variety of 75 minute teleseminars you can participate in by phone from the comfort of your own home.

• In each session we will introduce you to stimulating information and activities around music. The group interaction we encourage adds special energy to this experience, whether you attend in person or can only listen to the recording.

• We will guide you to listen to music so that your brain is challenged to stretch and grow. Continually expanding your horizons helps develop neuroplasticity, a major contributor to brain health.

• We will lead you through exercises which spark the mind-body-spirit connections so crucial to a high quality of life at any age.

• We will show you how listening to the right music consciously, with intention, can boost the inner strengths that foster authentic happiness.

• We will help you develop a personal Mindful Musical practice that can easily fit into your daily life and continuously nourish your total well-being.

First Session:  see description below for details

When:  Sunday, February 14, 2010 from 9 to 10:15 PM ET.

Where:  All you need is a telephone.  When you register, we will send you the contact phone number.

Cost:  $20 per session.   To register, click here.

Whether or not you can attend, when you pay you will have access to a recording of the session.

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First Session Information:

The good news these days is that we now know our brains don’t have  to deteriorate as we grow older.

But the realistic news is that we need to call on curiosity and other personal strengths to to keep our dendrites growing and synapses firing.

Amazingly, there are longitudinal studies of people whose brains, after death, were found to to show signs of Alzheimer’s Disease even though they didn’t manifest cognitive decline even in old age. This is most probably because they were able to call on extra cognitive reserves for protection.**

The possibility that exercising your mind, body and spirit as a whole can delay the onset of brain diseases is reason enough to make the effort.  Using music is one of the easiest and most natural ways to do just that.

Our first session explores the topic of the aging brain (aging starts earlier in life than you might imagine) by bringing you relevant music and activities that incorporate the good news about aging.

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**See E. Goldberg, The New Executive Brain (Oxford U. Press, 2009).  Dr. Goldberg advocates activating  many different parts of the brain through a “balanced workout.”

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MUSIC AS BRAIN FOOD is a brainchild of http://musicandhappiness.com.  To register, click here!

Subscribe to our newsletter to become part of our mailing list for future workshops and teleseminars.

Questions or comments?  Contact us at musicandhappiness@gmail.com.

Josh and I have just returned from the Positive Aging Conference with new ideas and inspiration garnered from the other participants, who ranged in age from their twenties to their eighties (some may be older–we didn’t ask).

The preconference Life Planning Network meetings were opened and closed by the singer/songwriter Barbara McAfee, who writes from a unique perspective and sense of mission.

Music was around us all the time at the conference. In a moving tribute to Dr. Gene Cohen of the National Center for Creative Aging, who was a major influence on many of the researchers and, sadly, died very recently, we sang together “This Little Light of Mine” (click to listen),  which lent itself wonderfully to additional verses celebrating his life.

Thank you to the enthusiastic participants in our workshop: Music and Happiness for the Mature Body, Mind and Spirit. Talk about good vibes!  Your willingness to follow our lead wholeheartedly helped us demonstrate some of the many ways the mindful practice of music can nourish the character strengths most associated with well-being (gratitude, zest, curiosity, love, and hope ).  Using your own favorite music can easily make this practice part of daily life.

If you would like to have the self-help tips we offered at the workshop to begin making music into a powerful mindfulness practice that supports daily well-being, just contact us using the form on this page.

You don’t need to formally meditate to become more fruitfully mindful. But you do need to practice paying attention to–and learning to savor–the good inside you and your environment.  Music is a natural way to foster this kind of practice.  Stay tuned as we explore all the ramifications of this thought in future newsletters.

Who can forget seeing the radiant young Audrey Hepburn sitting on the fire escape of a Manhattan apartment, strumming a guitar and singing “Moon River”?  This theme song from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with music by Henry Mancini and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, won Mercer his third Oscar in 1961.

Moon River/Wider than a mile/  I’m crossing you in style someday/

Old dream maker/ You heartbreaker/ wherever you’re goin’/

I’m goin’ your way…….

November 18, 2009 marked the 100th birthday of this quintessentially American lyricist and composer, Savannah Georgia’s most famous musical son.

Josh was privileged to attend the festivities marking this centennial in Atlanta as a keynote speaker at the international conference that celebrated Mercer’s rich musical legacy.  Georgia State University, which hosted this event, is the home of his collected papers.

We’re reminded of the great number of Johnny’s songs that still sing to us, such as:

Ac-cent-uate the Positive

Jeepers Creepers

Lazy Bones

Blues in the Night

In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening

One for My Baby

There is an enduring attraction in the music of this child of the South, who was so often inspired by the beauty and fragrance of the landscape he knew as a child.

It would be hard to resist the romance of these words he wrote about his boyhood summers in the country: “The roads were still unpaved, made of crushed oyster shell, and as they wound their way under the trees covered with Spanish moss, it was a sweet, indolent background for a boy to grow up in. Savannah was smaller then and sleepy, full of trees and azaleas that filled the parks which make it so beautiful….”

Mercer has a great gift for making us smile with him at his fun with language and respond with complex emotions to the memories he evokes.  His lyrics bring out the message of the music so fully that it’s almost impossible to imagine these songs sounding right with any other words.

Listen to specially chosen renditions of two of his songs here. One is sung by Johnny Mercer himself, the other by Barbra Streisand.